North-East medium, Noel Sorbie is set to tour the region. Steve Pratt talks to him

THE first time someone spoke to Noel Sorbie from the spirit world, he didn't understand this was a voice from beyond. "I was four and, being such a young age, I thought everyone had the same thing,"

"Then you get talking to your parents and they're starting to think there's something wrong with this lad, we'll have to get him sorted out'.

"They took me to a psychiatrist and said they thought I was talking to someone who wasn't there. But the psychiatrist examined me and said there's nothing wrong with him so he must be talking to someone'."

As time went on, he discovered that other people weren't doing what he was doing. He was different, so he "just shut up and didn't want anything more to do with it".

He put his communications with beyond aside and got on with his life. Come the 1970s, something happened to revive his ability to speak with the dead and messages began flooding in.

Newcastle-born Sorbie didn't submit himself immediately. "I was a very strong sceptic and took a lot of convincing there is life after death," he says.

Now 57, he was in his 30s when he accepted his ability to become a clairvoyant and medium.

Real proof on a personal level came to him at 36. He took a photograph through a window, only to find that the developed picture featured a Mandarin monk standing there in full colour. At first, Sorbie thought he'd been super-imposed.

"I was looking at the photograph wondering what was going on here, like any sane person would do. I took it to another person, a medium who said that is a Mandarin monk and you've been purposefully shown him to show you that you're not alone," he remembers.

As he embarks on a lengthy nationwide tour with three other North-East mediums, he can reflect on life before he accepted what he calls both a gift and a career.

He's worked in PR, been a double-glazing salesman and worked down the mines before becoming a full-time medium.

"I've always known what to do but steered away from it and felt it was wrong to go down that pathway when I didn't feel I understood how it all worked," he says.

"But as your life goes by and you look around, you wonder how you can help people get over their emotional problems and it clicks in. Before you know where you are, you're meeting the public and making contact and putting them at ease. You see the change in their faces and that joy at realising they're not alone and that those who have passed on are going back to make themselves known to them to give them that uplift in their lives.

"It's really a personal thing. Sceptics are entitled to their opinion. I have really good friends who believe in me as a person but don't believe in the spirit world. They find it very difficult to understand."

A BBC programme appeal in 1988 for healers ("what are healers?" he thought) led to him contacting a support group as he wanted to learn how to help people.

"It's a door that's open for us," he says.

"I started off healing people and all of a sudden I was getting spirit communications and needed help in displaying it."

He worked with the Spiritual Evidence Society in Osborne Road, Jesmond, to learn to channel his ability. "I started to work with the spiritual church as far back as 1989 and it gradually got bigger and bigger through word of mouth. I never advertised or anything like that," he says.

He was later invited to work at the Hale Clinic in London, where his clients during his two years there included Hayley Mills and her father, Sir John Mills.

SORBIE has strong views on how a clairvoyant and medium should operate, aware that the public can get the wrong impression of their work.

He's watched other mediums hone in on someone, manipulate their emotions and break their hearts. He believes that's the wrong approach.

"I believe in telling the message and keeping it light-hearted because those on the other side are coming through with humour," he says.

"In my opinion, and what I'm trying to get over to the public, is that they don't need to feel afraid to come along to something like this. They can join in and enjoy the evening."

His first-ever national tour sees him joining forces with mediums, Peter Crawford, Ralph Keeton and Carl Parker, on some dates. It stems from a conversation he had with Crawford in which both confessed to an ambition to play Newcastle City Hall.

Other mediums from outside the North-East appear there, but they wanted locals to have a turn. "We should have the opportunity to show what we can do, lads from the North-East. The manager gave us a few dates to choose from and that's how it kicked off," says Sorbie.

"Then we thought about doing a few more dates and the other mediums came in with us."

The tour is planned to continue for two or three years. There's no rivalry between the four of them. "We're all working in different ways and that's what makes it interesting," he says.

"We all keep it light-hearted when we do our shows and don't delve into people's lives too much but try to deliver the message with humour so they get a little lift.

"We want them to sit up and listen and enjoy the shows instead of being petrified they're going to be picked out and their whole lives opened up to them.

"Hopefully, the four of us will be able to deliver messages in a very profound way over the coming years of the tour in different parts of the country."

* Tour dates include Springs Health Club, Kingston Park, Newcastle on November 8; The Red Lion, Chester-le- Street, November 15; Stadium of Light, Sunderland, February 28; Swallow Hotel, Gateshead, March 6; Lamplight Arts Centre, Stanley, March 7; Swallow Hotel, Durham, March 13; Swallow Hotel, Stockton, April 6; Newcastle City Hall, May 31.